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Obama in Colombia: 5 political benefits

Obama is making a weekend trip for the Summit of the Americas. | AP Photo

“One of the ways we’ve helped American business sell their products around the world is by calling out our competitors, making sure they’re playing by the same rules,” he added. “For example, we’ve brought trade cases against China at nearly twice the rate as the last administration. We just brought a new case last month. And we’ve set up a trade enforcement unit that’s designed to investigate any questionable trade practices taking place anywhere in the world.”

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The White House has spent the week working hard to draw attention to Obama’s proposal for the so-called Buffett Rule — a minimum tax rate for the wealthy. It’s named after billionaire investor Warren Buffett, a backer of the idea.

Obama will find significant support for those kinds of social equity ideas among the Latin American leaders he’ll meet this weekend. In fact, one of the summit’s stated themes is “addressing poverty and inequality.”

However, Obama will have to guard against getting carried away in the company of some leaders whose politics do trend more in the direction of socialism and who don’t see redistribution of wealth as a dirty word.

”The Summit of the Americas very much expresses the fact that Latin America is a growing continent and has grown by distributing income and engaging in a social inclusion or social mainstreaming process,” Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said during a meeting with Obama at the White House earlier this week.

Maybe focusing on foreign policy isn’t so bad

Obama’s likely to face a series of thorny issues during the weekend summit. Several other leaders, including Colombian president and summit host Juan Manuel Santos, are planning to press him to consider decriminalizing drugs. Brazil’s upset with U.S. currency policies. And officials across the region feel a bit neglected by a White House preoccupied with the Iranian nuclear crisis and the economic meltdown in Europe.

However, it’s Americans who’ll decide Obama’s political future this fall and they’re actually fairly pleased with his work abroad. In a Washington Post-ABC poll taken earlier this month, voters favored Obama over likely GOP nominee Mitt Romney, 53 percent to 36 percent, when asked which candidate they would trust to handle international affairs. Obama held a stronger advantage over Romney on foreign policy than on any issue relating directly to the economy, the pollsters found.

“The charge that a president who travels abroad is somehow seen as being insensitive to domestic economic concerns is overblown,” Aronson said. “Clearly, they’re sensitive to that [but] I actually think the politicians are wrong about this. … Americans want the president to play that role.”

Obama’s team is playing up the importance of the travel and the direct connection to domestic issues.

“I think we made the case at a number of our foreign trips recently that the economic future of the United States is very much tied to our ability to export to new markets and to deepen our economic relationships around the world. So that was a theme of our trip to the Asia-Pacific region, which is the fastest-growing region in the world,” Rhodes said.

Aronson said Obama’s bigger problem may not be that he’s spending too much time on foreign policy but that some of his election-year overseas trips — like the roughly 48-hour jaunt scheduled this week — are so short, some foreigners may see them as an insult.

“The sort of quickie trips leave a little feeling of ‘Slam, bam, thank you, ma’am, and don’t love ’em in the morning.’ I don’t they’re really the right message you want to send,” Aronson added. “I don’t think he serves himself well in terms of foreign policy by doing that.”

Attending an international summit with our closest neighbors is really, really awful bad and the politico comment section paid trolls will now explain how bad it really, really is. Or maybe,President Obama is doing what he was elected to do.

It will be a while before the talking point trolls can come up with anything. Colombia's right wing government has been their ally for so long there's no automatic insult for visiting the country. The especially stupid might try the angle that campaigning for public opinion is immoral and only done by Democrats. I will take a while for the Drudge report and think tanks to come up with something that doesn't sound quite as stupid.

Besides, how could they not love Colombia? They're the main conduit for the hemorrhaging of taxpayer money towards ridiculous goals like an ineffective war on drugs or fighting some brain dead communists worshiping Che in some godforsaken corner of the jungle. If we don't give military contractors billions of dollars to deal with these backwards jungle communists we'll all be speaking Spanish under the yoke of our cruel Cuban warlords, Red Dawn told me so!